Nobel Prize

Presentation Speech by Harald Hjärne, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the , on December 10, 1920 In accordance with the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the Swedish Academy has awarded the literary Prize for 1920 to the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun for his work, Markens Grøde (1917) [Growth of the Soil]. It would be…

Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the , on December 10, 1923 Very early, in the first bloom of youth, William Butler Yeats emerged as a poet with an indisputable right to the name; his autobiography shows that the inner promptings of the poet determined his relations to the world…

Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, Permanent Secretary of the , on December 10, 1936 Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic production has been of a sombre character from the very first, and for him life as a whole quite early came to signify tragedy. This has been attributed to the bitter experiences of his youth, more especially to…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the This year’s Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to a writer of German origin who has had wide critical acclaim and who has created his work regardless of public favour. The sixty-nine-year-old Hermann Hesse can look back on a considerable achievement consisting of novels, short…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the In a youthful manifesto of 1913 entitled Ordkonst och bildkonst [Verbal Art and Pictorial Art], Pär Lagerkvist, whose name was then unknown, had the audacity to find fault with the decadence of the literature of his time which, according to him, did not answer the requirements…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Salvatore Quasimodo, the Italian poet who has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, is a Sicilian by birth. He was born near Syracuse, to be more exact, in the little town of Modica some distance from the coast. It is not difficult to imagine…

Presentation Speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the , on December 10, 1970 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Our passports show where and when we were born, facts that are needed to fix our identity. According to a current theory this also applies to authorship. A literary work belongs to its time,…

Presentation Speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Eyvind Johnson’s education – that is, the education provided by society at that time – ended when he was thirteen and was imparted to him at a little village school north of the Arctic…

Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release October 1983 The Nobel Prize in Literature 1983 William Golding William Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies, 1954, rapidly became a world success and has so remained. It has reached readers who can be numbered in tens of millions. In other words, the book was a bestseller,…

Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release October 3, 1991 The Nobel Prize in Literature 1991 Nadine Gordimer “who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity” The Swedish Academy has decided to award the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1991 to…